Archives for June 2012

An extremely well articulated Human Events piece on why Obama is so wrong on job creation:

On August 5, 2011, President Barack Obama stated that: “We need to create a self-sustaining cycle where people are spending and companies are hiring and our economy is growing.” Clearly, we need a self-sustaining cycle of job creation.

The question is: How do we start one? The president’s solution is his “jobs bill,” which includes government spending on infrastructure projects in order to employ construction workers and government financial assistance to states to employ public workers, and a tax increase on wealthy Americans to pay for it. This is the wrong path to a sustainable economic recovery. To create the economic climate he desires, the president would be well advised to consider relying on the private sector rather than government.

Marco Rubio does a good job conveying the conservative message to an NPR audience.

From TheAmerican Spectator:

As millions of NPR listeners made their way home in Thursday afternoon’s oppressive heat, their windows rolled up and AC on (incidentally allowing them to hear the radio more clearly), Florida Sen. Marco Rubio managed to achieve three important goals: 1. Sound simultaneously intelligent, principled, and likeable; 2. Make a principled case against raising taxes; 3. Make an equally principled case for compromising with the opposition to fix the nation’s federal budget mess before it becomes an irreversible disaster.

Watching President Obama lead this nation is like watching a reverse episode of Undercover Boss. But Obama’s undercover leadership is having far more disastrous consequences than a fake CEO’s would, as the entity that Obama is currently running into the ground isn’t merely a corporation.

If you’re unfamiliar with Undercover Boss, it’s a reality TV show that places the disguised CEOs of various companies temporarily undercover in entry-level positions within their organizations, giving them the opportunity to observe operations firsthand. The results are often hilarious and leave you wondering just how it is that these CEOs are able to lead these companies when they seem to lack the ability to perform some very basic tasks. It’s proof positive that sometimes it’s better for everyone when a person just stays within his own particular skill set.

Because these CEOs have such a tough time with their temporary jobs, does this mean that if the scenario were reversed, and selected workers were placed undercover as CEOs, we would witness once and for all how easy the job of fat-cat CEO really is? I think not, but it would be fun to watch the events unfold, as surely many of the long-held theories and stereotypes of what it would be like to run a large company, and the imagined ideas of what it is that bosses actually do, would be brought along and employed by these temporary bosses.

Many likely hold the romanticized vision of a CEO with his feet up on the desk, mindlessly barking orders to a bunch of underappreciated peons, and not doing much of anything else other than playing golf or jet-setting around the globe while an unlimited supply of money magically flows into the company coffers. This might be true if your last name happens to be Kennedy or Kerry, but for most it’s simply not the case.

While the pressure of being a CEO would certainly cause many to buckle, a few of these undercover workers might possess the audacity to claim (while surrounded by evidence to the contrary) that the corporation’s business model “never worked” in the first place and that it needs to be “fundamentally transformed” before it ever will work. Still others may use their newfound authority to vilify and punish the top producers within the organization or try to spread around the earnings of the high earners in the name of “fairness.” The results of this kind of so-called leadership would no doubt be disastrous for the companies involved if this reign of power went beyond the very temporary.

With Barack Obama as president, there’s no need to wait for an episode of Undercover Worker to be created; we’re currently witnessing the national equivalent firsthand. Since Obama has taken office, we’ve had an undercover community organizer in the White House, and the effects on this nation’s bottom line are as one would expect from someone with his particular set of skills.

If our undercover community organizer were president for only a day or two we wouldn’t be in the debacle we currently find ourselves in. But after more than three years of Obama’s “leadership,” we’re left with six trillion in new debt, a failed so-called stimulus, real unemployment in the double-digits, food stamp usage at an all-time high, the failed creation of “preferred” green energy jobs that filled the pockets only of Obama’s crony donors, and a health care law that will only accelerate our road to bankruptcy if not overturned.

This level of incompetence would never be tolerated by the American people if the mainstream media were doing its job and truly informing the public. Instead, we have undercover activists, such as Soledad O’Brien of CNN and a host of others disguised as objective journalists, carrying the water for President Obama and the Democrats. Fortunately, the new media is starting to force the MSM to do its job even if it is at an extremely slow pace. After all, one need only look toward Wisconsin to see how the antitheses of Obama’s policies are working and for an example of true leadership. People do seem to be finally getting the message, which explains why Scott Walker survived the recall effort by a sizable margin.

Was Obama so sure that his theories would work that he thought that all he had to do was sit back, put his feet up on the desk, and bark out his orders, and the rest would just fall into place? If so, this may explain why Obama thought he had so much time available for golf and lavish vacations. Wouldn’t it be nice to be a member of the cool crowd?

Obama now appears shell-shocked that things haven’t worked out as he had demanded, and this has forced him to utilize his real skill set — community organizing. He’s trying to bully the economy into working by vilifying the job-creators; dividing people along racial, economic, and gender lines; and threatening to use executive orders when he doesn’t get his way. His desperate tactics now appear too strong even for some big-name Democrats, who appear to want off the sinking ship.

The shareholders of this nation need to hold Obama accountable and oust this undercover community organizer who’s currently making a mess of everything he touches. He really is an amateur who has spent his entire life surrounded by the cocoon of left-wing theories and stereotypes. Experience and reality trump theory and stereotypes every time and contrary to what Obama is trying to sell us, the private sector is not doing fine under his leadership.

On Undercover Bosses, when the CEOs go back to their real jobs, everyone is relieved, and life improves greatly for all involved. This is why it’s time to hire a leader who possesses actual real-world experience for the job of president this November. Mitt Romney’s resume, while it does contain some flaws, shows that his skill set is a much better fit for the position he’s applying for than the “skills” of the White House’s current occupant.

The next time you leave the grocery store with plastic bags in tote and notice the disapproving glare from someone proudly carrying a canvas bag that’s printed (using earth-friendly ink) with words that one way or another say “I care more about the environment than you do,” you can now confidently look back and say “not so fast.”

A recent study as reported by Townhall finds that the HDPE (plastic) bag is actually the most earth-friendly.

From the study:

The conventional HDPE bag had the lowest environmental impacts of the lightweight bags in eight of the nine impact categories. The bag performed well because it was the lightest bag considered. The lifecycle impact of the bag was dictated by raw material extraction and bag production, with the use of Chinese grid electricity significantly affecting the acidification and ecotoxicity of the bag.

The study reports that a canvas bag is expected to last for 52 trips (Table A.3.1). With that as a reference, a cotton/cloth canvas bag user does over twice the damage to the environment that a plastic bag using grocery shopper who throws away every plastic bag they get immediately after each shopping trip, as they will likely have to replace their more environmentally-destructive bag at least once long before they reach 131 uses!

However, if a consumer reuses 100% of their conventional HDPE plastic bags (say as trash bags), the number of uses needed for the other bags to have a lesser environmental impact than the conventional HDPE plastic bag rises by a factor of anywhere from 2.2 to 2.5, which we see in the table above. For example, that re-usable canvas bag would need to be used at least 327 times to be less damaging to the environment!

Good intentions often come with unintended and undesirable consequences as I pointed out in a previous piece about the light bulb ban, and it looks as though the plastic bag hype is turning out to be no different.

During a recent business trip I went to a Home Depot in San Jose to buy some electrical materials for a project. Apparently San Jose has decided to take political correctness one step further as I was asked if I wished to purchase a bag. I refused out of principle and bundled everything up by hand and carried it out to my truck in disbelief.

So if you truly wish to protect the environment you should use either plastic bags or nothing at all and carry your goods out by hand. Of course dozens of contractors carrying loose nails bought in bulk out to trucks parked way out in the neither regions of the parking lot could prove to be a bit of a problem for the store’s clients and their tires.

Today’s European debate isn’t about governmental austerity, it’s about governmental reality. Ultimately, the argument is not whether governments can keep trying to stimulate their economies, but when their creditors will quit financing it. Somehow, Europe’s governments, teetering on tilting economies, have missed this point; we can only hope that Washington hasn’t.

We are witnessing a prolonged domino-effect among the world’s economically intrusive states. It began over two decades ago with the fall of the USSR and communism across Eastern Europe. Now the dominoes are falling into Western Europe — Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Italy, all are threatened with economic collapse.

In addition, in running for re-election, President Bush promised to cut the budget deficit in half, and he did so. By 2007, his budget deficit was $161 billion, a mere fraction of every one of Obama’s trillion-dollar-plus deficits. In that year, by the way, we were still at war in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and the tax cuts had been fully implemented years before, conclusively putting the lie to Obama’s claim that Bush handed him astronomical deficits as a result of his tax cuts and two wars. Utter nonsense. Shameless propaganda.

Barack Obama was, in fact, a member of the socialist New Party in the 1990s and sought its endorsement for the Illinois senate–contrary to the misrepresentations of Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, and in spite of the efforts of Politico’s Ben Smith to quash the story. Stanley Kurtz, author of Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism (2010), has released new “smoking gun” evidence at National Review Online. It is evidence that the mainstream media can no longer ignore–and Obama can no longer deny.

In a new paper, The Heritage Foundation’s Jason Richwine and the American Enterprise Institute’s Andrew Biggs analyzed Wisconsin’s reforms and their impacts on the state’s government workers. They found that even after requiring them to make larger contributions to their pensions and health benefits, Wisconsin government workers are still overpaid when compared to private-sector workers with similar levels of education and experience.

My article as originally published in American Thinker: Bloomberg can try to sugarcoat this all he wants but NYC’s proposed ban on the sale of large soda drinks over 16 oz, which is supposed to save people from their own destructive impulses, is yet another example of the ever growing nanny-state. Obviously confused as to which country he lives in, Mayor Bloomberg says: “We’re not taking away anybody’s right to do things, we’re simply forcing you to understand that you have to make the conscious decision to go from one cup to another cup.” Aside from the lost freedoms involved, this should make the trash collectors union happy.

While Bloomberg and the government have absolutely no business “forcing” people to do such things, the Mayor actually inadvertently makes the case for why we need “forced” limited government.

“The idea here is, you tend to eat all the food in the container in front of you,” Bloomberg said on MSNBC Thursday afternoon. “If it’s a bigger container, you eat more. If somebody put it in a smaller glass or plate or bowl in front of you, you would eat less.”

The amount of food or beverage that people pay for and then consume using their own money is nobody’s business but their own. What is everybody’s business though, is the ever expanding colossal girth of the Federal Government due to its voracious appetite for taxpayers’ money. Isn’t it about time that the government is placed on a “forced” diet for the health of the entire nation?

Bloomberg’s logic equally applies to government spending as well. You see, the government tends to “eat” all of the tax dollars that are placed in front of it. If it’s a bigger “container” of taxes, it “eats” more. If a smaller “container” of taxes were placed in front of the government, it would be forced to “eat” less. But without some sort of “forced” restraint, the government has the ability to just borrow or print more dollars for its consumption.

The only way to “force” this tax diet would be with a Constitutional Amendment to cap spending as a percent of GDP such as what Milton Friedman had proposed in Free to Choose or like the Spending Limitation Amendment (SLA) as proposed in 2010 by Reps. Mike Pence, Jeb Hensarling, and John Campbell.

If we’re truly interested in a healthy nation, instead of the government limiting consumers choices (read freedoms) to things like a maximum 16oz soda, why don’t we instead limit the Federal Government’s choice to a maximum of 16% of the GDP? Otherwise, the way things are going, this behemoth is going to explode. Try as it may the media can only sugarcoat these economic numbers for so long.

President Obama did inherit an already obese Federal Government, but despite the claims by some that he placed it on a healthy diet, the truth of the matter is that Obama actually super-sized virtually everything.